The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
A week before Christmas, as my wife Leone and I sat with Glen and Dianna Bartley at the Legion's weekly meat draw, discussion gravitated to mining Ð as it so often does in a mining town. Glen explained that he had just come back from dropping a mutual friend off at the Flin Flon airport and while there, he ran into former Snow Laker Cal Hammond. Cal asked him to drop something of his dad's off with the Snow Lake Mining Museum. It was a core box, and nestled securely within were some of the finest zinc and copper samples most people would ever hope to see. Cal didn't know how his father, Fred Hammond, came into possession of the samples. All he knew is that they weren't a retirement gift, as they were given to him at some point before he retired. It was a birch core box, obviously hand-crafted, which had drill core from Chisel Lake Mine (he believed) inside. I took a picture of it and sent it to former HBMS Snow Lake Mines GM Jack Walsh and several other current and past employees. Jack didn't know anything about the presentation, but stated that Fred Hammond came from Flin Flon to Snow Lake as a Long Hole Diamond Driller and that he remembered him as one of the absolute best there was. He noted that Fred initially came to diamond drill short "exploration" holes to help HBMS properly locate development headings relative to the ore zones. As Fred would have worked in all the Snow Lake mines, Walsh thought that the core might have come from all the mines Fred drilled in. Current Chisel North Maintenance Planner Paul Hawman agreed with the assumption that the core was from all area mines. He also thought the samples and box might have been included in displays at various mining conventions years earlier. Snow Lake Mayor Garry Zamzow, a former Chisel Lake Open Pit Foreman, recalled seeing and admiring this particular core display many times around the HBMS office. He said that the core is amazing, but he too couldn't come up with any history on the samples. Both Hawman and Zamzow are on the Snow Lake Mining Museum Board and state that the samples will add immeasurably to the museum's core display, as well as stimulate interest and discussion with visitors and tourists. Zamzow mentioned his thanks to the Hammonds for the donation. If anyone else has information on the core and box, I'd certainly like to update people on it... so I'd be interested in hearing from you. Another thing that I'd be interested in hearing from you relates to the ghost town of Herb Lake, Manitoba. Over the course of the next year or so, Jim Parres and I will be writing a book on Herb Lake. If anyone has any pictures of or items relating to Herb Lake (that we could photograph), it would be appreciated if you could contact me at Box 612, Snow Lake, MB., R0B 1M0. The phone number is (204) 358-2887 and the e-mail is [email protected]. We are also looking for: - Interviews with people who lived in the community, Herb Lake Landing, or at Mile 81 and Mile 82. - Information (and pictures) on Kate Rice, Dick Woosey, Joe Kerr, Walter Johnson, the Diamond Queen, George Bartlett, Albert Corman, Ralph Bryenton, Gaspard Richard, Hugh and Wilf Vickers, Julius Campbell, Mike Hackett, Charlie Krug, Billie Wedge and others who lived or worked there. - Any anecdotes and stories at all about the town and its characters.
